Kelly McNeill writes “Apple has a treasure trove of canceled products buried in its backyard and doesn’t even realize it. The company that “thinks different” has created a lot of worthwhile products that have been discontinued or abandoned for unknown or unstated reasons. The Mac users who enjoyed these products have sometimes petitioned Apple to revive them — only to be disappointed. Apple apparently sees no reason why these products should be revived.”

The Globe and Mail reports that Bill Gates is back on top of Forbe’s list of the world’s wealthiest people, and this time he’s well ahead.

Kelly McNeill writes “After telling developers that open source was detrimental to its software and should not be used, Microsoft took some heat for lumping all open source licenses together in one group. In fact, each license is unique. Several industry observers soon brought it to Microsoft’s and the public’s attention that the company does publish several of its products under a BSD license. So, Microsoft quickly clarified its stance by mentioning that open source was only harmful when software was published under the GPL open source license. Unfortunately, Microsoft has problems there as well. Microsoft does, in fact, produce open source software, not only under the BSD license as was recently been made known, but also under the GPL!”

PC World asks what happened to the USB 2.0 standard, and why the faster protocol is slower to market.

Australian I.T. reports that Microsoft could soon be facing another law suit from the US department of justice, responsible for the recent antri-trust suit which resulted in Microsoft being ordered split in two.

MSNBC reports on the real-life future of artificial intelligence bots in relation to the recent movie, ‘AI’.

CNET News.com: “CD-burning company Roxio, smarting from a controversial lawsuit filed against it by music
company Gracenote, is challenging that company’s rights to a vast database that helps identify
albums.”

CNET News.com: “In a posting on the Sourceforge.net site, Douglas E. Warner said he received a letter from an
attorney representing AOL, who asked him to stop using the letters “AIM” to describe his phpAIM
project. PhpAIM is an interface to AOL Instant Messenger written in the open-source PHP
language.”

From EE Times: “Despite years of effort, the EDA and design communities are losing their
battle to make tools more interoperable, as the cost of making tools work together is
only increasing. But proliferation of open-source licensing may win the war. That was
the message delivered at a panel held Wednesday (June 20) at the Open Source
breakfast panel at the Design Automation Conference.”

More Open Source at Microsoft: Earlier this week, it was revealed that stats.zone.com is running Linux and Apache. An anonymous reader dropped wrote in to let us know that ListBot, the Microsoft-owned mailing list service, is running Apache via Solaris. Oh, and Microsoft’s ad banner exchange service LinkExchange seems to prefer Apache and FreeBSD.